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500+ years? Last I looked into what some major players in computational neuroscience were doing simulating highly accurate neurons they were doing on the order
by milesvp 6y ago
500+ years? Last I looked into what some major players in computational neuroscience were doing simulating highly accurate neurons they were doing on the order of maybe thousands of neurons. It’s been a few years so maybe they can simulate 100k today. The human brain has 100billion neurons. And that’s just part of a system. I don’t know how many other cells you’d need to simulate to model just the space between your ears. And I don’t think we’re even talking at the protein level yet of simulations. Proteins are notoriously difficult to simulate. If bitcoin had managed to use protein folding as it’s proof of work I’m not sure we’d even be able to fill the current demand for research let alone simulating an entire human. I don’t think I can fathom the amount of compute we’re talking about to simulate a human at the drug interaction level to any real degree of accuracy.
- foota 6y agoThat seems overly pessimistic to me, in the last hundred years we've gone from basically no understanding on a molecular level of the human body to a decent understanding of much of the chemistry of the body, it seems like the next hundred years could conceivably advance to the level where we have a good understanding of even the smallest interactions.